Shelby still looked embarrassed. “I don’t really know. She said he was always staring at her boobs. I don’t know about that, sometimes Veronica can be melodramatic that way. Her mom always says, Veronica, you think the whole world is in love with you, just wait till you find out it’s not.”
Veronica’s mother sounded like a bitch, although I’d known girls like that growing up too. But my heart was beating hard in my ears. I suddenly remembered the conversation the girls had been having when I first encountered them at Joshua’s house last week.
On a scale of one to ten, how frequently did he ogle all the girls in class?
And it wasn’t just that. Shelby was clearly picking up on something about him too.
“Shel,” I said. “Listen. I know that sometimes something might make you feel weird, and other things just make you feel bad. And as a woman, you have a little sensor in your brain that tells you which one it is, right?”
She nodded, watching me watching her in the reflection in the passenger-side window.
“You owe it to yourself to pay attention to that sensor, always, always,” I said.
Shelby nodded again. Then she turned and faced me. “I don’t like him,” she said again. “I don’t like how he looks at me.”
“And how does he look at you?” Something dark began to coil around my chest.
“Like—I don’t really know how to explain it. Like he knows something about me. Except he doesn’t, he doesn’t know me at all,” she said.
“Overly familiar, like,” I said.
“Yeah,” Shelby said. “I guess that’s what it is. He came into the restaurant one time,” she said. “And he sat at the bar and every time I was seating a party, he smiled at me. Wow, that sounds so stupid. He smiled at me. So what. I don’t know. I just don’t like it.”
She shivered in the cold, so I finally turned the car on. Her color had returned to normal. She didn’t seem to realize that what she told me was still exploding in my brain. In the rearview mirror, I saw Derrow slowly drive away, pointedly not looking at me.
When we got back to the house, Joshua had shaved and changed clothes and had taken the collection of beer bottles out of the kitchen. He looked bright-eyed and rested. “Thank you,” he said. “I mean it.”
He invited me to stay for dinner—pizza delivery was on the way—but I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I felt nauseous and crazy and like anyone could read it on my face, that I was terrified of my own conclusion. Derrow hadn’t blipped on my radar at all until now. At first, he was helpful. Then at the Brayfield house, he’d been aggressive with me but at the time, I thought it fit with the context. But the unknown calls had started immediately after I met Derrow for the first time and—I realized as heat spread across my face now—the calls had stopped once I was arrested. He didn’t call while I was locked up because he knew I wouldn’t answer, and he didn’t call after that because I did exactly what he wanted: I gave up and went home. My cheekbone throbbed. Trying to force a connection hadn’t gone very well for me before. But sometimes the connection insists on making itself. The universe sends you the same lesson over and over until you learn it. The world is a series of patterns on its own; the coincidence is only in the discovery of them.
Can’t go over it. Can’t go under it. Can’t go around it.
Gotta go through it.
*
The lobby of the police station was empty at nine o’clock. I walked in and went directly to the photos in the lobby, the ones I’d spent an hour looking at while Lassiter kept me waiting the other day. Five-by-sevens with little engraved plaques on the bottom of each frame. SHOCK, 2015. About twenty kids in matching green T-shirts. I squinted at the image and saw Veronica Cruz in the second row, smiling halfheartedly. Jack Derrow stood behind the kids, his arms folded over his chest. I went back in time, guessing when Colleen Grantham might have been in the program. If she was.
Of course she was.
SHOCK, 2007. The year she disappeared. She stood in the front row, looking uncomfortable. Jack Derrow was in the background of this shot too.
I went back a few more years. Mallory wasn’t in the class of 1999, the year she was murdered. But she would have dropped out of school by then, already married to Joshua. I looked further back and found her in 1997, a dead-eyed stare from the back row. Jack Derrow was directly behind her.
I took a deep breath and sat down on a bench. This was a connection that was hard to ignore. Derrow had been involved in five of the welcome receptions I’d received in Belmont. He knew all three girls. I thought about the way he’d acted during my arrest, his hand slowly snaking up my chest to unzip my coat.
But what about Sarah? She hadn’t been a troubled kid.
Then it hit me.
The Cooks were personal friends of his.
He had told me this himself.
*
The lounge at the Westin was packed tonight. I took the last open seat at the bar and nodded at my brother as he held up a hand to indicate that it would be a minute until he could get to me. While I waited I thumbed the screen of my phone, debating. I wanted to call Tom. Some part of me was still pissed at him. But he’d know what to do next, or he’d know how tell me to drop it, that I’d finally lost my mind after nine months of not thinking very clearly anyway. But at any rate, he’d know.
I couldn’t do it.
My contact list was a wasteland of people I no longer spoke to. Cops, lawyers, a woman from the county sheriff’s office whom I’d gone on two miserable dates with a year ago. I put the phone away.
“You,” my brother said, sliding a shot across the bar, “were supposed to call me today.”
“Isn’t in person better?” I said. I downed the shot and pushed the glass back for another.
“It is,” Andrew said, “but right now you just want something.”
I laughed. “Me?” I said.
He grinned at me. “What is it?”
“I want to borrow your car,” I said.
He refilled my shot glass and poured one for himself, looking at me with mild concern. “What happened to yours?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I mean, I want to trade cars. Just for a few days. I need to go incognito.”
“I told you that car would be shit for surveillance,” Andrew said.
“And I told you to get the Escape because no one would ever think somebody in a beige compact SUV was up to no good,” I said. “Which is exactly what I need.”
We swapped keys. A woman in a grey suit at the opposite end of the bar rapped her snifter sharply on the polished wood, and Andrew rolled his eyes. “I hate these fucking people,” he said. “All night it’s been like this.”
“It’s okay,” I said, “go. I’ll take good care of your baby, I promise.”
He started to walk away, but then turned back. “Roxane,” he said, “I don’t give a shit about the car. Take good care of you.”